My Apologies to Rebecca Soni

I love everything about the Olympics.  Mostly I love that (most) of these people aren't bazillionaires with endorsement deals up the wazoo that are competing out of their love of the sport or their country or the competition.  And sure, some of them probably are competing with the hope of getting an endorsement deal worth bazillions, but the point is they aren't there yet.  They're teenagers, college students, and tax accountants who happen to be really good at trap shooting.  I love the emotion on a swimmers face when they touch the wall and spin around to see what place they are in.  Even better, I love the look on the face of someone who knows they've won, but spun around anyways to find out if they set a world record.  It's just awesome.  I like finding out that a gold medalist from a country with a population smaller than Gresham sets off a celebration in his homeland that shuts down the whole island.

As a result of this love for the Olympics, I try to watch as much as possible.  I've been keeping tabs on the handball tournament (I've been particularly impressed with Norway's womens team, who came back from six goals down today to beat Brazil, the top seeded team).  I've learned what an Amanar vault is, and I watched quite a bit of the equestrian event one morning, simultaneously hoping for and against a horse to trip and toss its rider (it happened once, and it was the most terrifying and exciting thing I saw all day). 

All this watching has left me quite sleep deprived, thanks to NBC's insistence on running the "good" events until Midnight every night.  The worst part about their Olympic coverage is the idea that anyone watching the Olympics needs to be entertained with Mary Carillo gallivanting around London pretending to be James Bond playing "Go Fish" at a casino.  Would you really rather watch that or a random 400M hurdles heat?  Awful. 

After one of these particularly long nights of Olympic coverage, as I lay in bed trying to go to sleep, I started thinking about how great it would be to talk to an Olympian, to find out firsthand what their experience was like.  Now I don't know any Olympians off the top of my head, so I was thinking how I could meet one.  The answer, of course, is the Internet.  I mean, if I can meet my wife online, why can't I meet an Olympian?  So where to Olympians hang out online? 

Twitter. 

So I'm thinking "I should tweet an Olympian."  Unfortunately, most twinteractions (get it?  Twitter and interactions combined) with quasi celebrities consist of "OMG YOU R SO AWSUM - CAN I GET A RT FOR MY DYING DOG?" to which the celeb will respond "sure!" and that's it.  Even if I got an actual question to an Olympian, they'd have to read it and think it was worthy of more than just hitting the retweet button, or replying with a one word response before moving on to the next tweet."  Not the best plan to accomplish my goal.  My next thought was "how do I make Twitter work for me?"  It occurred to me that I saw somewhere that Michael Phelps plays a lot of Words with Friends - a game I really like playing.  How cool would it be to play an Olympian in a knock off version of Scrabble on their iPhone?  So I made this my mission:  To play an Olympian in Words with Friends.

As I mentioned above, the best way to get a celebrity to retweet you is first compliment them, then ask for a RT because of some reason.  Usually this reason revolves around someone having cancer or a cause, such as "can I get a RT for rape victims?"  No celebrity wants to look like the person who doesn't care about rape victims, right?  Also, I'll typically notice that people begging for RT's will shamelessly send umpteen requests for retweets to umpteen celebrities in a row.  I didn't want to look that desperate.  I really only a little desperate, and not using something awful like disease or crime victims to achieve my goal.  So I used my birthday.  Also, I wasn't going to blanket every Olympian with a tweet asking to play WWF. My first attempt at this, I tweeted at Kevin Love, Aly Raisman, and someone else, and I felt like a jersey chaser.  So I needed to pick an intended target.  Here was my criteria:

• Had to be an American.  While it would be cool to play an Olympian from Italy, the language barrier would make the game play difficult. 
• Had to be active on Twitter
• Had to have at least some level of fame.  Not because I don't think our trampolinist wouldn't be fun to play, or was less deserving, but since I was only going to tweet at one Olympian, I wanted it to be someone who, on the off chance they decided not to play me but would retweet my request would have a better chance of it being seen by other Olympians.
• Had to be an adult.  While it would be somewhat cool to say "I played a game online against the reigning gold medalist in women's all around gymnastics," I'd also have to say "I'm interacting with a 16 year old girl online."  Chris Hansen can tell you how that usually turns out.
• Had to have a short Twitter handle.  The longer the handle, the less characters you have to get your point across. 

Thus I decided on 200M breaststroke world record holder Rebecca Soni.  She didn't respond....shocking, right?  I tried tweeting at the official US Olympic twitter page, but that wasn't happening either.  I tried using a hashtag (#TeamUSA)  over and over, but it didn't work.  I made one more run at Ms. Soni, but then I just felt kinda creepy about the whole thing and bagged my idea.  Bottom line is that I suck at Twitter.  As evidenced by this blog, I'm a volume writer.  I don't really excel at getting my point across in 140 characters.  I haven't really embraced the hashtag thing, and I more often than not just invent my own, which defeats the purpose of the hashtag, as no one is going to be looking for a tag they don't know exists.  Twitter is this strange universe where ordinary people have a direct line to celebrities and tend to abuse that opportunity by talking crap about their physical appearance or lifestyle choices. 

Bottom line, it's much harder to converse with an Olympian than I first thought it would be.  Then again, I was thinking this in the middle of the night after watching four straight hours of fantastic Olympic coverage (aside from the painful Mary Carillo puff pieces that make me want to never watch the Olympics again).  Also, Rebecca Soni, I'm sorry for bothering you, and I promise I'm not a creepy stalker.  I just wanted to play a little knock-off Scrabble with an Olympian and ask them a few questions, like

• What's the best non competition moment you had?
• What kind of interactions (if any) did you have with athletes from other countries in other sports?
• If you're planning on competing in the 2016 games, when will you start training in earnest for that, or when did you start training for London? 
• What percentage of an average day did you devote to making it to London?  Did you feel guilty if you went to see a movie or read a book instead of working on your technique in front of a mirror? 
• How jealous are you of Michael Phelps?
• Do you think/know some of your competitors are doping? 
• Did your parents have to take out a second mortgage or go bankrupt to get you here? (Just kidding on that one....it's absolutely abhorrent to me that the media is reporting on the financial situations of athletes parents.)